Feedback Stabilization over Commutative Rings: Further study of the coordinate-free approach

This paper is concerned with the coordinate-free approach to control systems. The coordinate-free approach is a factorization approach but does not require the coprime factorizations of the plant. We present two criteria for feedback stabilizability for MIMO systems in which transfer functions belong to the total rings of fractions of commutative rings. Both of them are generalizations of Sule's results in [SIAM J. Control Optim., 32-6, 1675-1695(1994)]. The first criterion is expressed in terms of modules generated from a causal plant and does not require the plant to be strictly causal. It shows that if the plant is stabilizable, the modules are projective. The other criterion is expressed in terms of ideals called generalized elementary factors. This gives the stabilizability of a causal plant in terms of the coprimeness of the generalized elementary factors. As an example, a discrete finite-time delay system is considered.